It started with an idea. Forty hours later, it was the birth of Facebook Video.

On Friday, students formed teams to work for 24 hours straight on hacks for new product ideas that could very well result in similar success.

Hackathons are usually internal operations at Facebook where engineers get together to try and create innovative new products using the Facebook platform. It was at one of these hackathons that Facebook Video and other products such as Facebook Chat were invented.

After seeing the achievements that came from these hackathons, it occurred to Paul Tarjan, Facebook engineer, that the event could expand to future leaders in engineering: university students.

Five schools were chosen out of the pool of about 15 that Facebook most often recruits at: Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of California-Berkeley and University of Texas-Austin.

Winners of each “Camp Hackathon” event will be flown to Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., on an all-expenses-paid trip. There they will have their hacks critiqued by a panel of executives and industry leaders.

The assignment is simple and hardly has any limitations. To Girish Patangay, Facebook software engineer, this is the advantage.

“Any one of those kids inside there (Siebel Center, where the event was held on campus) could have made Facebook,” Patangay said. “That’s what we want to foster.”

What many students like about “Camp Hackathon” specifically is the interaction it allows for.

“When you have Facebook engineers there, it makes it a lot easier to get motivated because you have people there to help you,” said Tony Chuinard, sophomore in LAS and Engineering.

The one-on-one interaction allows for a more personal way to do networking and get to know those already in the field.

“It isn’t like, ‘I talked to you at a job fair.’ Instead it’s ‘I talked to you at three in the morning when I couldn’t get my code working,’” said Olga Dalecka, junior in Engineering and member of the corporate team for the Registered Student Organization Association of Computing Machinery.

Events like “Camp Hackathon” are made possible because of the corporate partnership Facebook and the University shares. Yen Do, University recruiter at Facebook, said these events serve as a better way to reach students. Oftentimes, Do said, University students are hired for internships and half-time and full-time jobs at Facebook.

Winners of “Camp Hackathon” will have the opportunity of having even more exposure to Facebook executives and possibly Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg, Do said.

The winning team consisted of Hani Sharabash, senior in Engineering, and Islam Sharabash, sophomore in Engineering, who created “Thumb Jockey,” a service that allows you to text a number with a song or artist and automatically add it to a public queue using Grooveshark, an online music library. For example, at parties, where DJs use Grooveshark partygoers would be able to used Thumb Jockey to text their requests in.

In mid-November, the Sharabash brothers will fly to Palo Alto and team up with University alumni to either continue working on Thumb Jockey or create something entirely different.

“It’s the kind of thing that gets you excited to build something and apply what you know,” Islam Sharabash said. “I’m really excited to go out (to California). It’s going to be probably a lot of fun.”